Freedom Cannot Survive the Death of God

This article was ported from Stoking the Embers, our sister site.

“With the death of God, intellectuals thought that they would achieve autonomy and total human freedom. But the death of God led, in fact, to the death of freedom and obscured a correct concept of the human being. God is the one and only compass that can orient us toward happiness.”
— Cardinal Robert Sarah

Cardinal Sarah is talking about one of the great paradoxes of modern history. And if you’re paying attention, you can see it playing out right now.

When Nietzsche came down from his pedestal to proclaim to us simple minded folk that “God is dead”, he wasn’t just trying to be edgy. He was diagnosing Western culture. The uniting Christian framework that held everything together—meaning, morality, Truth, the very concept of the human person—had dissolved. The Enlightenment intellectuals saw this collapse coming and thought, “Finally! We can be free!”

Follow me on X | Instagram | TikTok | FB | YouTube

The logic seemed sound: Remove the external authority—Scripture, commandments, religious tradition, the Church telling you what to do—and people could finally define their own values, create their own meaning, write their own moral codes. We’d be autonomous. Self-legislating. Masters of our fate, captains of our souls.